What is WebP and Why You Should Care about it?

What is WebP?

Website speed is one of the crucial ranking factors these days. According to the research, viewers do not wait for more than 3 seconds for a website to load. They rather prefer to hit the back button and check out the competitor’s website. Well, the number one reason for a slow-loading website is large-sized and heavy images. That’s the reason why website owners are opting for WebP image format to reduce the file size and preserve the image quality.

Keep reading this post to learn more about WebP images and why webmasters need to care about it.

Introduced by Google, WebP is the latest image file format that aims to make your image file size smaller. When it comes to uploading image files on WordPress and other content management systems, users pick from PNG, JPG, and GIF formats. While all these offer great quality, they come with their share of drawbacks. For example, most of the image file formats consume a considerable amount of space on your websites. This results in slow-loading speed.

Basically, WebP is a perfect alternative to PNG and JPG file formats. It reduces the file size without compromising the image quality. It allows webmasters to display high-quality images on their websites without having to worry about the website speed. Before we look into the benefits of WebP, let’s understand the lossy and lossless compression.

What is Lossy and Lossless Compression?

People reduce the file size of an image to make the image compatible with the website. Basically, you need to compress the data present in the image to reduce its file size. But as you do that, the image quality is compromised to a certain extent. In fact, the more you reduce the size of the picture, the lower the quality gets. The reason behind launching WebP file format was to create an open-source file format that is compatible with both lossless and lossy compressions, reduce file size, preserve image quality, consume less power (especially on smartphones), accelerates the page loading speed, and use less bandwidth.

Lossy and Lossless compressions refer to the art of reducing the image file size without compromising on the image quality. WebP intends to reduce the file size of an image while preserving its quality. This image format has been used since 2010. In short, WebP gives perfect lossy and lossless compression. Here are the benefits of WebP format:

Benefits of WebP Image File Format

As mentioned before, the primary goal of WebP file format is to provide webmasters with a lossless compression i.e. reduced file size and the same quality image. So far, it is better than almost all file formats out there – including JPEG and PNG.

• Maintains the Website Loading Speed

Images take up a significant amount of space. The heavy images and large-sized multimedia content interfere with the performance and speed of your website. If you add lots of such images to your website, there is a good chance your website will give a poor performance. The slower your website loads, the more customers you lose. After all, website speed is the first factor your audience will consider before doing business with your company. A fast-loading website is extremely important for brands and bloggers.

No matter how popular your brand is, a slow-loading website will drive your potential customers away from your brand. Fortunately, WebP reduces the size of all the image files on your website. The smaller images you display on your platform, the faster the loading speed your users get. Moreover, search engines consider your website loading speed before ranking your content. So, smaller images will not only improve your website speed but ensure a good ranking in the search engines.

• Compress the Data Without Affecting Quality

Many file formats can be used for compressing data in the given image. But these file formats affect image quality. No matter which file format you choose, it will affect the image quality if you reduce the file size. However, each file format can have a different impact on image quality.

For example, the pictures you save in the WebP format can be converted into a smaller image than PNG or JPEG, without losing quality. In fact, the lossless compression in WebP gives you 26% smaller files than PNG while lossy compression results in 25 to 24 percent smaller files than JPEG.

• Transparent Images

Another benefit of the WebP image format is transparency. Whether you use lossy compression or lossless compression, you will get 100% transparent images. Transparent images are used for multiple purposes on the internet. Logos and branding are two of the most common uses.

You don’t get transparent images in the JPEG file format. It may reduce the file size to some extent, but JPEG fails to offer transparent images. On the other hand, the lossy compression of WebP gives extremely transparent pictures that can be used on websites.

Note: While there are many advantages to using WebP images on your website, the image format is not backed by all browsers. WebP images are not supported by Safari.

How to Open WebP File Format in Different Browsers?

Google launched this file format to improve the performance and loading speed of the website by reducing the file size of heavy images. If research is to be believed, then WebP will soon be supported by almost all major browsers out there. Let’s see how you could open WebP images on different browsers:

The best part is that WebP images look almost similar to the PNG and JPEG files. This means users can save the WebP images on their smartphones and computers the same way they would save JPEG, PNG, or GIF files.

You only have to right-click the picture you want to save on your computer and choose ‘Save Image as’ option from the menu. Select the location you want to save the file and click Save. If you are using Firefox, Opera, and Edge browser, you need to right-click the picture only. That’s it! You will be able to access and view the image in your default browser.

Moreover, users can edit the WebP images using multiple programs and software such as ImageMagick, Microsoft Paint, and GIMP. To open the image in a program, right-click the picture, and click Open With, and choose the software you would like to edit the image. You can also convert your PNG, JPEG, and other images into WebP image format using Web Photoshop Plugin.

Conclusions

WebP is one of the versatile and effective image file formats that act as the perfect replacement for JPEG and PNG. Whether you want to upload pictures on your website or save images on your computer, WebP makes a perfect file format.

By lowering the page loading time, this file format aims to improve your website performance and boost efficiency. The faster your website loads, the better it ranks in the search engine and the more customers it attracts.

How can imghaste help you serve webp to browsers that support it

If you are using our service worker integration you don’t need to do nothing about it. We will take care of this for you automagically.

If you are creating a custom integration for your website or your mobile apps, you can use one of the following syntaxs.